Jewish Peace News (JPN) is an information service that circulates news clippings, analyses, editorial commentary, and action alerts concerning the Israel / Palestine conflict. We work to promote a just resolution to the conflict; we believe that the cause of both peace and justice will be served when Israel ends the occupation, withdrawing completely from the Palestinian territories and finding a solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis within the framework of international law.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Here is an update regarding the criminalization of New Profile, putting it in the context of larger stepsby Israeli authorities to suppress freedom of expression. Support given so far is highly appreciated, but more is needed! -- See below.

Racheli Gai

An update on our investigation and further recommended action

An update on our investigation and further recommended action

Dear Friends and Supporters,

So many have stepped forward to back New Profile during this time. We would like to thank you warmly. This has been deeply meaningful for us. In a truly amazing show of support, you have sent over 5,000 letters to Israel's Attorney General, protesting the criminalization of New Profile, via the Jewish Voice for Peace website. You have, moreover, taken many other actions, as suggested on our website.

We are writing to let you know that your voice is getting through, apparently penetrating the indifference of Israeli authorities. The Israeli Human Rights and Foreign Relations Dept. has sent many of you a formal answer, indicating that they cannot afford to ignore the massive mobilization of New Profile supporters worldwide, and exposing their need to save face

We are writing to ask you to keep up your meaningful work; please stay with us and write the government again (see proposed sample letter below) that you are not convinced by their façade of human rights and legalese. (You can once again do this either through Jewish Voice for Peace or independently, to one of the addresses listed on our website).

An escalating abuse of state power

New Profile is not an isolated case. Eleven New Profile activists were detained or summoned by police for interrogation on trumped up suspicions of incitement and assisting in the obtainment of fraudulent exemptions from the military. For a full month they remained under restrictions and four activists' computers were held by the police. A court case, and even prison sentences, may be in the offing (Check our website soon for ongoing updates).

All of this, however, is part and parcel of the sharply increased scapegoating, intimidation and harassment of Israeli citizens, and especially Palestinian citizens of Israel, who dare to voice opposing opinions. The Association of Civil Rights in Israel notes an escalation of harassment and violence against Left Wing activists by Israeli government authorities and the police since Israel's military incursion into Gaza in December 2008, in an apparent, systematic attempt to silence dissent and stifle political discourse.

Here is a short list of some of the victims and incidents: 1 Samih Jabarin (41) – from Yaffa (Jaffa), is being held under strict house arrest at his parents' home in the city of Um Al Fahim. He is charged with assaulting Chief of the Northern Border Patrol, during a demonstration on no evidence other than the officer's own statement. Jabarin, who is barred from his creative work, his studies, and his normal living environment, also serves as a blatant warning to other activists (see petition in his support). 2 Anarchists Against the Wall - Members of this organization also experience ongoing attempts to oppress their activities against Israel's occupation of Palestine and its inhuman separation wall. Now, more and more, the Israeli military is targeting Israeli citizens, too, in addition to Palestinian and international protesters against the wall with lethal shootings, violent attacks, arrests and detention. 3 Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, is preparing a detailed report (soon to be featured on their website) on police violence against Arab university students who protested Israel's attack on Gaza, violence which was expressly allowed and aided by university authorities. Four of these students, Palestinian citizens of Israel, whom Adalah lawyers are representing, are currently facing charges and trials. 4 Adalah also reports the ongoing detention of some ten activists from the town of Shefamr, in northern Israel, all detained following the attack against Gaza, on suspicion of stone-throwing and/or disturbing the peace. 5 Ezra Nawi, an activist known for his work in South Mt. Hebron, West Bank, is accused of having assaulted a police officer during a demonstration to prevent the demolition of yet another Palestinian home. His ongoing work in the area has brought the plight of the Palestinians into the spotlight and his arrest is an attempt by authorities to silence him. 6 At a demonstration on April 30th, protesting the politicized investigation of New Profile, organized by the Coalition of Women for Peace, Tel Aviv police injured one of the women demonstrating and held eight demonstrators overnight, in a move that the court declared unjustified.

This is just part of the accumulating evidence of Israeli authorities' systematic deployment of police and the military to stifle protest and paralyze civil activism, while terrorizing Palestinian civil society in particular. The repressive, undemocratic state revealed by such practices cannot be hidden by legalistic phrases or respectable-looking letter heads. It is very far from the democracy that Israel claims to be.

Thank you for helping us let Israeli authorities know that their abuses of state power are visible and shameful, while their formalistic claims are unconvincing.

Sincerely,

Rela Mazali and Ruth Hiller, New Profile

Sample letter

Here is a sample letter to use if you wish:

Dear Mr. Assaf Radzyner , Adv.,

Thank you for responding to my protest against the criminal investigation of New Profile. Despite the explanation offered in this response, it has come to my knowledge that the attempted criminalization of New Profile is merely one case in a process of sharply increased scapegoating, intimidation and harassment of Israeli citizens who dare to voice opposing opinions. I have recently learned of accumulating evidence of Israeli authorities' systematic deployment of police and the military to stifle protest and paralyze civil activism. The repressive, undemocratic state revealed by such practices cannot be hidden by legalistic phrases or respectable-looking letter heads.

Some of the cases that have come to my knowledge include: the imprisonment of Samih Jabarin, police brutality against Anarchists Against the Wall and the Coalition of Women for Peace, the trial against Ezra Nawi and various measures of repression taken against university students, especially Palestinian Israeli citizens, by university authorities and by the police (in Haifa and elsewhere).

I would like to voice my strong protest against this escalating abuse of state power.

Monday, May 18, 2009

To mark the 61st Nakba Day, I attended a tour of the ghosts of former Palestinian villages in Tel Aviv, beautifully organized by Zochrot (www.zochrot.org). In each of the villages we stopped in (Shaykh Muwannis, Summayl, al-Manshiyyah, and Salama, and there are four more: Jammasin al-Gharbi, Abu Kabir, Fisherman's Village and Irsheed), a direct refugee or descendent spoke to us about their former lives.

We stood at the beach, at the site of the Etzel (Irgun) Museum, one of the Jewish terrorist militias (so-called by the likes of Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt) of the 1930s and 1940s, which shamelessly incorporates the last remains of the only standing Palestinian home of the village into its very structure. They would not allow us inside, we were told, so we could not see what a home in the village would have looked like. The rest of al-Manshiyyah, having been leveled, is now a grassy beach park.

In each village we heard the stories of relatives scattered in every direction of the Palestinian Diaspora: Gaza, Amman, Cairo, Baghdad, Nablus, northern Israel, Lebanon, Canada. The randomness of the results of those frantic choices resonated and overlapped in both familiar and unfamiliar ways with the Jewish Diaspora. Each guide told us how their families had come to leave their land, bringing alive the terror and uncertainty of the years 1947 and 1948, proving how academic are the debates about whether the Palestinians of the region were exiled or fled. Life was made unbearable in various ways, and eventually everyone in the region was pushed further and further south, first to Jaffa itself, then maybe to Gaza or the open sea.

We went to a Muslim cemetery which stands now on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, its graves still occasionally desecrated, the city refusing to allow it to be rehabilitated, still visited by relatives trying to honor their ancestors.

In Shaykh Muwannis, which was on the site of what is now Tel Aviv University, and whose lands included where my mother-in-law's home stands today, we stood at the door of the locked faculty club, which was the only original house left standing by the 1970s. The woman who spoke with us there told us that the cemetery where her grandparents are buried is now inside the nearby Shabak headquarters, and it is impossible to go and pray there.

In central Tel Aviv, a man (originally of Summayl, now of Jaljilya, a town in Israel's "triangle," by way of Jaffa and Nablus) told of his childhood before the Nakba, running through the orchards from home (Ibn Gvirol St) to school (Namir Rd). Those are now solid city blocks, but in his words, "I can see those orchards as clearly as I see you all in front of me now."

This has what has always struck me about Tel Aviv, and all of Israel. There are overlapping worlds inhabiting the same space. One is usually invisible, but it is still here.

As was noted at the beginning of the tour: the Nakba is not a date. It is a process that is ongoing, continuing even through today.

On my way home by taxi from the tour, I heard an interview on the radio celebrating 100 years of "our beloved Tel Aviv." Reprinted from last month's Haaretz below is an essay about the city that has haunted me since I read it, by acclaimed author Yarom Kaniuk. At first it seems like merely an old man's reminiscence about his youth and his city, and the first section may only be of interest to those who know the city well. But it ends with a chilling-- and despite everything--sad prediction of its fate.

Of the Hebrew writers alive today, Haim Gouri is the first native of Tel Aviv, but because he betrayed us by moving to Jerusalem, I have remained the first native Tel Avivian writer. On the day I was born, there were 23,708 rooms in Tel Aviv. The Yekke (German Jewish) falafel vendor on Lasalle Street had not yet arrived in the country. A total of 2,936 trees were planted that year. Aside from me, 2,100 babies were born in 1930, whereas 510 Jews and one non-Jew died. Six hundred and ninety-one people married. Two hundred and ninety-one divorced. There were 16 car accidents and 120 bicycle accidents. Twelve miscarriages were reported, and 16 cases of hysteria, and my father was appointed [mayor] Meir Dizengoff's secretary.

What is it about Tel Aviv that makes it so praiseworthy? Me personally, I am not suited to it: I don't like sun. I don't like summer. I'm a sabra [native Israeli] but I can't stand the sabra fruit; watermelon is okay, but nothing special. Of all the vegetables, my favorite happens to be spinach, which aroused a fair amount of disgust among the city's children. Like everyone else, I used to spend hours at the beach. The father of one of my friends, who had the franchise for renting out beach chairs at Frishman Beach, next to the "Tir" shooting range - where they would fire into the air and kiss on the sand in the dark - would give me a chair for free and I sat with an awning over me like the old people.

During the 11 years that I lived in New York I thought a lot about Tel Aviv, but I invented it in my mind, fixing it permanently as it was when I left. And it's true, I preferred New York. Sometimes I would look at old photos of Tel Aviv, and think that maybe I wasn't born in that city. So why is it that now I like living here so much? I have no idea. One doesn't love a city, one barely loves a woman or a man. When I travel to beautiful and marvelous cities abroad, I place an EKG in the street and it reads zero, and I count the days until I return to Tel Aviv.

I lived in Ramat Hasharon for 14 years, and I don't remember a thing from there. But Tel Aviv flows through my blood. Maybe there is something to it after all? Tel Aviv is the first Hebrew city - before Los Angeles. But precisely because it's Hebrew, and everyone is proud of that fact, most of the signs in the city are written in all kinds of languages that merchants believe to be English. Once there were cafes with lovely names: "Atara," "Snir," "Kankan," "Kassit." Today Cafe Hillel is one of the only cafes with a Hebrew name, written in English, because old man Hillel apparently emigrated to America and served as a soldier under Washington, of blessed memory.

Effervescent city

Tel Aviv is the only city in the world where people died before anyone was born there. In 1902, because of the cholera plague, the Turks forbade burial in Jaffa and the Arabs buried their dead in the place where the Hilton Hotel now stands, next to Independence Park, whereas the Jews bought a plot far from Jaffa, on Trumpeldor St., and began burying their dead in it. A substantial percentage of the people who gave their names to the city's streets are buried in this lovely cemetery, which is therefore both geography and history. Anyone who has gone on a tour of this cemetery, the most beautiful in the city, with my dear friend Shlomo Shva as guide, will not forget the stories of loves and hates buried there.

On Nordau Boulevard, at the corner of Ben Yehuda Street, stood the kiosk of Grin, who was the brother of David Ben-Gurion. Anyone who agreed to curse Ben-Gurion here was given soda with syrup, instead of plain soda water. There was also Berele's kiosk, where my father stopped each day to ask for soda without syrup, before riding his bike to the Tel Aviv Museum, which he ran. My father would wait until Berele said, "Without which syrup, Mr. Kaniuk?"

There were four theaters in Tel Aviv at the time. There was an opera, a philharmonic orchestra and chamber concerts in the museum on Shabbat. There were crazy people who lay down in the street. The greats were strongman Shimon Rudi, who took apart iron chains with his teeth to the illumination of two motorcycle headlights; girls would hang on to his muscles and shout and he would play them to the garmoshka of Shpil, who knew one song but knew it well. The song they sang at the time was "Tel Aviv, a city of roofs and sky and cries of the shoeshine boy," but there was also the weissen kesselach and the alte zachen (old clothes seller) and the milk delivery man, who used to shout "Milk, milk." And there was the ice man, and there was the man who once a year would come with a device like a hand cello, with one string, and inflate the winter blankets that had slept in the closets all summer long.

So what is it about this city that I live in and love to live in? I don't know exactly what. Stockholm is much more beautiful, but for me Stockholm, like Paris, is a church without God. New York is already too big. Copenhagen gets boring after a few days, but remains as beautiful as a queen. Is Tel Aviv beautiful? Yes and no. Most of the houses in Tel Aviv today, to which the leaders of the nation have moved, look like huge cemeteries. If you land at Sde Dov Airport, you see a huge gray cemetery with ugly eight-story houses, a shopping center and a cafe for women and trees that look like little leaves.

Old Tel Aviv is beautiful. It is beautiful in an artificial way. It is old because they decided that it would be a "White City" and the capital of Bauhaus, as it really was once upon a time. So I really love living in old Tel Aviv. That is also where I was born - when Tel Aviv was still a Hebrew dream and my mother taught at the late Gymnasia Herzliya high school, where she also taught the words that Eliezer Ben Yehuda would invent every day.

The small streets of the old city are pleasant. Personal. There are gardens behind the houses. But the houses are so expensive to live in that although I am the oldest of the city's writers and received the great honor of being declared an honored citizen of Tel Aviv, I can't live there in an apartment of my own, so I have to rent.

Young people have always made the city. Then as now. Old people have memories, young people have life before death. Tel Aviv is effervescent. Once effervescent referred to a drink, the way today's national beverage is diet cola, and once they used to drink tzuf (nectar) - so what? Tel Aviv oozes a power of survival that does not exist in any other city I know. It has the pleasantness of transience. It has impulsiveness. It is more of a mistress than a legal wife, and natives of Be'er Sheva count the days until they will be considered Tel Avivians.

A place of birth is not such a big deal. When I was a few days old I was brought to my parents' apartment on Balfour Street, at the corner of Rothschild Boulevard; at the time, perhaps somewhat later, a woman who used to shout a lot committed suicide there. Later I would sit on the balcony, I was 3 years old and I saw the young people singing - back then the rich people didn't live in the Azorei Chen district, in that huge and ugly cemetery - but on Rothschild Boulevard.

A city-state

There were several relatively new Arab villages near Tel Aviv: Someil and Jamusin, and there was the German Sharona. For a while we lived in Kiryat Meir, then the border between Tel Aviv and the Arab world, and my father would walk around at night banging metal cans to chase away the jackals. Today it is Dubnov Street, which hides behind Ibn Gvirol, who was then still a poet. In Sharona we bought butter and cream, they held Nazi parades there that the Arabs of Someil joined.

I got stuck one night in Sheikh Munis; it was my turn to escort two girls from the youth movement - Mahanot Ha'olim - to school, perhaps Seminar Hakibbutzim, and to return them. I said a password. But the Arab boys decided to take care of me. Never mind. I survived. My hand was hurt. One of the boys was hit hard. After years in New York a man stopped me and said, "Do you remember me?" I said, "Maybe you were on the illegal immigrant ship Pan York when I was bringing in immigrants?" And he said, "No, you broke my hand in Somail and I remember." We embraced. I don't remember why. A girlfriend who was with me burst into tears. A policeman stopped to ask if everything was all right and I told him that we had grown up together in Palestine. He didn't know where that was and went on his way, twirling his baton.

Today Tel Aviv is no longer the capital of Zionism as it once was, because Zionism is finally dead. Therefore Tel Aviv, which began as a cemetery, is today an independent city. It is no longer the country's real capital, the capital is now in Hebron or in the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem; today Tel Aviv is a city-state, of the kind that once existed in the world. Florence was not Italy, but a city-state that fought against Venice. And in this city-state there is a special atmosphere. There is the joy of the poor. There is sadness that unfolds while the country is being destroyed.

Today I am old and ill. In the Tel Aviv bubble I can walk anywhere on foot and at the same time sleep peacefully, because the small streets of the city that is now being renewed - but is preserving its short past - are quiet. And you are in the center of the city, near the bustle of everything that in Berlin requires a train journey of almost an hour. I'm not willing to be buried in my city. I will be cremated into the open world. Because to leave a gravestone on the ruins of the Zionist dream seems to me artificial, and sad, and heartbreaking. But my grandmother and grandfather are buried in Trumpeldor and in Nahalat Yitzhak.

I met an old woman at Ichilov Hospital who claims that she lives above the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery and that she bought a burial plot for herself there, and from her window she sees where she thinks she will live for eternity. There will be no eternity for this city. Tel Aviv almost became the beginning of Zionism and Hebrew culture and it will remain when everything is in ruins and empty of the pampered children who will emigrate from here to Los Angeles. So that I won't be the only one to see Tel Aviv from the air.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

On May 14, the annual day for commemorating the Nakba, the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians with the establishment of the state of Israel, Ha'aretz announced the proposal of a new law in Israel banning all commemorations of the Nakba. The law was proposed by Yisrael Beiteinu, the political party of Israel's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. The proposed legislation threatens three years imprisonment for anyone who commemorates the Nakba. (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1085588.html)

Yisrael Beiteinu's party spokesman is quoted as saying that the law intends "to strengthen unity in the state of Israel." That statement, and this proposed law, should set off anti-fascism alarms. In the name of "unity," here is a proposal to criminalize acts of memory, collective identity, and cultural and political expression. In the name of Israel's majority group, this proposal seeks to criminalize memory and memory-makers, effectively criminalizing the group-identity of Israel's largest minority population. The very existence of a culture relies on its memory, which comprises the stories a culture tells about itself. This law would threaten the existence of Palestinians as a remembering, culture-producing, history-bearing people, and would prevent the possibility of Israel becoming a truly pluralistic society where every group's history can be told. And by forbidding the remembering of the Nakba, the law aims to erase the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians - including thedestruction of more than 400 villages, multiple massacres and the creation of more than 700,00 refugees, and the confiscation of thousands of acres of land - even as this same political party's platform threatens another form of dispossession, that is, removing citizenship from Palestinian citizens (http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/02/growing-trend-toward-fascism.html).

Reports of the proposed law say it will punish anyone who commemorates the Nakba, not just Palestinians. In this way, the proposed law signals other recent developments in Israel, whereby Israeli Jews are being targeted in campaigns aiming to silence their protest, similar to ways in which Palestinians - both inside of Israel and in the occupied Territories - are also targeted for silencing. (For more on this targeting and the recent persecution of the Israeli Jewish group New Profile, see here: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/05/rela-mazali-israels-war-against-youth.html).

The threat to imprison anyone who commemorates the Nakba is also a reminder that everyone engaged with the state of Israel has an obligation to know and remember the Nakba. A good source for information and commemoration is the Israeli organization "Zochrot," which offers extensive education on the Nakba, both on their website (http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?lang=english) and in actual tours of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. Zochrot's "links" page also offers many different sources of information, maps, and testimonies on the Nakba (http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=379). Norma Musih of Zochrot writes, "Awareness and recognition of the Nakba by Jewish-Israeli people, and taking responsibility for this tragedy, are essential to ending the struggle and starting a process of reconciliation between the people of Palestine-Israel." (http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=642) As an American Jew, I think it's just as important for Americans, and for Jews, to recognize the tragedyof the Nakba, so that we, too, can understand what Palestinians have suffered and what is at stake for them in this conflict.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Hot on the heels of our previous posting today, by journalist Amira Hass, Haaretz has issued news of her arrest by Israeli police today (Tuesday, May 12th). This is one more instance, among many, of the heightened, violent repression of dissenting voices in Israel today. It is also part of the ongoing attempt by Israel to suppress detailed and accurate information about the reality of its attack against the Gaza Strip earlier this year.

Israel Police on Tuesday detained Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass upon her exit from the Gaza Strip, where she had been living and reporting over the last few months.

Hass was arrested and taken in for questioning immediately after crossing the border, for violating a law which forbids residence in an enemy state. She was released on bail after promising not to enter the Gaza Strip over the next 30 days.

Hass is the first Israeli journalist to enter the Gaza Strip in more than two years, since the Israel Defense Forces issued an entry ban following the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in a 2006 cross-border raid by Palestinian militants.

Last December, Hass was arrested by soldiers at the Erez Checkpoint as she tried to cross into Israel after having entered the Gaza Strip aboard a ship run by peace activists from Europe.

Upon discovering that she had no permit to be in Gaza, the soldiers transferred her to the Sderot police.

When questioned, Hass pointed out that no one had stopped her from entering the Strip, which she did for work purposes.

Hass was released then under restriction, and Nahmani said her case would be sent to court.

Israel Press Council chairwoman Dalia Dorner, a former Supreme Court justice, commented then that even journalists are subject to the law and the council cannot defend a reporter who breaks the law. Instead, she said, local journalists ought to petition the High Court of Justice against the army's order.

Successive Israeli governments since 1993 certainly must have known what they were doing, being in no hurry to make peace with the Palestinians. As representatives of Israeli society, these governments understood that peace would involve serious damage to national interests.

Economic damage:

The security industry is an important export branch - weapons, ammunition and refinements that are tested daily in Gaza and the West Bank. The Oslo process - negotiations that were never meant to end - allowed Israel to shake off its status as occupying power (obligated to the welfare of the occupied people) and treat the Palestinian territories as independent entities. That is, to use weapons and ammunition at a magnitude Israel could not have otherwise used on the Palestinians after 1967. Protecting the settlements requires constant development of security, surveillance and deterrence equipment such as fences, roadblocks, electronic surveillance, cameras and robots. These are security's cutting edge in the developed world, and serve banks, companies and luxury neighborhoods next to shantytowns and ethnic enclaves where rebellions must be suppressed.

The collective Israeli creativity in security is fertilized by a state of constant friction between most Israelis and a population defined as hostile. A state of combat over a low flame, and sometimes over a high one, brings together a variety of Israeli temperaments: rambos, computer wizards, people with gifted hands, inventors. Under peace, their chances of meeting would be greatly reduced.

Damage to careers:

Maintaining the occupation and a state of non-peace employs hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Some 70,000 people work in the security industry. Each year, tens of thousands finish their army service with special skills or a desirable sideline. For thousands it becomes their main career: professional soldiers, Shin Bet operatives, foreign consultants, mercenaries, weapons dealers. Therefore peace endangers the careers and professional futures of an important and prestigious stratum of Israelis, a stratum that has a major influence on the government.

Damage to quality of life:

A peace agreement would require equal distribution of water resources throughout the country (from the river to the sea) between Jews and Palestinians, regardless of the desalination of seawater and water-saving techniques. Even now it's hard for Israelis to get used to saving water because of the drought. It's not difficult to guess how traumatic a slash in water consumption to equalize distribution would be.

Damage to welfare:

As the past 30 years have shown, settlements flourish as the welfare state contracts. They offer ordinary people what their salaries would not allow them in sovereign Israel, within the borders of June 4, 1967: cheap land, large homes, benefits, subsidies, wide-open spaces, a view, a superior road network and quality education. Even for those Israeli Jews who have not moved there, the settlements illuminate their horizon as an option for a social and economic upgrade. That option is more real than the vague promises of peacetime improvements, an unknown situation.

Peace will also reduce, if not erase entirely, the security pretext for discriminating against Palestinian Israelis - in land distribution, development resources, education, health employment and civil rights (such as marriage and citizenship). People who have gotten used to privilege under a system based on ethnic discrimination see its abrogation as a threat to their welfare.

Protesters, activists and draft evaders are being targeted by a broad programme of state repression

About six months after Israel's attorney general publicly announced an effort to criminalise dissent, state authorities have upped the ante in their "war" – as the daily Ha'aretz called it last September – against Israel's youth and against the broad, grassroots protest movement of young Israelis who avoid serving their compulsory time in the military – slandered by officials as "draft shirkers".

On 26 April, a day before Israel's Memorial Day, Israeli police produced an absurd piece of political theatre – as Dimi Reider first reported here last Thursday. As if facing down dangerous organised criminals, they raided the homes of six activists in different parts of Israel, who were then detained for interrogation. Exploiting the emotions roused on a day of mourning for military dead, the police action singled out and branded anti-military activists as outside the legitimate Israeli community.

At the time of writing, police have summoned 10 additional activists for interrogation. The activists targeted are members of New Profile, a feminist movement working for over a decade to reverse the militarisation of state and society in Israel. I have been a member since its inception. New Profile intends to uphold the right to open discourse on the crucial issues young people face and we work to change the militarised thinking holding us, all the residents of Israel and Palestine, hostage. Our activism may enrage some, but our activities are totally legal.

The reality is that rising numbers of young Jewish Israelis – as well as the Druze minority who are also subject to conscription – find themselves unwilling to accept the Israeli dictate "There's no other choice". Four generations and over six decades of failed "military solutions" have engendered a broad social movement of young people who have severe internal struggles when asked to serve in the military.

Israeli law offers virtually no legal provision for conscientious objectors and Israel's courts – both military and civil – class the reason for refusing service as "political", "psychological" and only very rarely "conscientious". The soul-searching brought on by deciding to serve has caused many young people real distress. In recent years, Israeli soldiers' suicides have accounted for more deaths than all the other types of military casualties combined.

According to Ha'aretz, the criminal investigation of New Profile is motivated by "growing concern at the defence establishment of a growing trend of draft evasion". It is not New Profile that is worrying them, we are just an easy scapegoat through which they hope to sow fear and intimidate future draft dodgers. The state has thus declared a war against the many thousands who resist the draft and refuse to place their bodies, their minds, and their morality at the disposal of visionless politicians.

For years now, the army has regularly been exempting tens of thousands from service without difficulty. In fact, several years ago the military and the (very same) defence minister declared a downsizing programme, towards creating "a small, smart army". Their worry today is rather the popular vote of no-confidence in their easy use of the lives of soldiers – an anger no longer limited to alienated, impoverished parts of society but spreading deep into the middle class as well.

The growing legitimisation of the draft resisters in the Israeli mainstream is also evidence of the weakening of the hold fear has on our society. Those in power, both the right and the so-called "left", are struggling to keep in place this longstanding means of obscuring political corruption and of feeding the notion of "national unity" in the form of "the people's army".

Tragically, this war on New Profile is part of a broader programme of state repression of political dissent. Palestinian citizens of Israel were detained by the hundreds for protesting at Israel's attack against Gaza last January. Many remain in detention still, without charges, trial or due process. Activists taking part in non-violent protests against the land-gobbling dragon of Israel's separation wall are regularly attacked with lethal fire. Just weeks ago Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma was killed by soldiers in Bil'in. Dozens of activists, both Palestinians and Jews, are detained at demonstrations and incarcerated for varying periods. In most cases, the repressive measures applied to Jewish activists still bear no comparison, in terms of their arbitrariness and brutality, to the means employed against Palestinians.

However, the political theatre of repression being played out against New Profile is of great importance. Every act of repression is important and should be resisted, and when it is applied to a group of relatively privileged, middle-class, and largely middle-aged feminists, such repression may be more visible to mainstream Israeli society. This will more easily expose the state's fabric of lies and ludicrous, trumped-up charges, and allow decent but uninformed people a concrete grasp of the reality of the situation. In the balance yet again lies the future of freedom and rights for everyone in Israel and the Palestinian territories, because what is at stake are the lives of Israeli youth against whom the state is waging this war. What we are struggling for is the future of a democratic, civil society.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

David Shulman is a long-time Ta'ayushnik and author of the wonderful book "Dark Hope," which chronicles several years of Israeli involvement in the Palestinian non-violent resistance movement, from a very personal perspective.

This beautiful and heartbreaking report from this weekend is a reminder both of the daily struggles in the West Bank, and the brave Israelis and Palestinians who are resisting the settlers and the Army together.

--Rebecca Vilkomerson

May 3, 2009Pogrom at Khirbet SafaBy David Shulman

Pogroms: it's something the Jews know about. I grew up on those stories—Cossack raids on the shtetl, the torture and killings and wanton destruction. My grandmother had a brother. They lived in Mikhalayev, in the Ukraine. One day the Cossacks came, and everyone panicked, and the seventeen-year-old brother tried to hide in a pond, and he drowned. She mourned that young death all her life; the dead don't age, and some wounds never heal.

And now it turns out—who would believe it?—that there are Jews who also know how to carry out pogroms. For the last ten days or so, settlers from Bat 'Ayin in the so-called Etzion Bloc have been paying violent daily visits to their Palestinian neighbors in Khirbet Safa, perched high on the edge of the western ridge that overlooks the coastal plain all the way to the sea. A terrorist from Khirbet Safa entered Bat 'Ayin two weeks ago, murdered a settler boy with an axe, and wounded another. The police caught him soon thereafter. But that hasn't stopped the Bat 'Ayin settlers from repeated rampages to wreak revenge on Khirbet Safa. They've already killed four innocents, and another eleven or twelve have been wounded by gunfire. As if that weren't bad enough, the soldiers have apparently been making common cause with these settlers, opening fire readily at the villagers. Life in this most beautiful of the mountain villages has become a nightmare; not that it was easy before.

We get the emergency call around 5:00 after a long day that started off in Susya, in South Hebron. At first it looked as though we'd never get through the barriers and the roadblocks; like last week, we had police and army on our tail from the moment we left Jerusalem. Two full buses and several private cars headed south by the long route twisting over the dry hills. A grey, sultry day, summer approaching: in the endless battle in the wadis and terraces between green and brown, green seems to be losing ground. Every once in a while the soldiers would stop one of the cars and threaten to stop the buses. But, happily, by midday we had rendezvoused at Susya with a van of Palestinian activists from all over the West Bank. All in all, some 150 Combatants for Peace—former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian members of the armed resistance organizations who have given up all forms of violence—had come to meet each other and to see the reality of South Hebron.

This is what it will look like one day, I was thinking. Like in Berlin when the Wall fell. Maybe I won't live to see it, but I know it will be like this. People, ordinary people from both sides, pour out of the vehicles more or less into one another's arms. The soldiers in their jeeps with their guns and other deadly toys are helpless to hold back this flood of dangerous fraternization. Some of them look to me like they'd like to join us. It all happens fast and very naturally, without thinking. Walking over the rocks and thistles toward the tents of Susya, I hear snippets of conversation like many I've heard before. Awkward, tentative, eager. Strangers introduce themselves: "I'm 'Abed. I live in the refugee camp at Dahariyya." "We're from Bethlehem." "I'm from Tel Aviv, I'm a student. I served in the fucking army for three and a half years." (This with a somewhat sheepish smile). A young Palestinian man to a dark-haired Israeli woman: "Would you come visit me in my homesomeday?" "I don't know. Maybe. I'm afraid." A short silence. "Yes, I'll be happy to come." I, too, embrace my friends: Hafez, Isa, Nasir, 'Id, the gentle, irrationally hopeful, anxious 'Id.

We stand among the black tents facing the Israeli settlement of Susya with its red-tile roofs and the new "illegal outpost" that settlers have put up on the next hill, just a couple of hundred meters off. In the distance, at Shuneran, you can see the lonely white whirl of the new turbine our people have recently set up for our Palestinian friends. Wind-driven, it's already generating enough power to run a refrigerator and a newfangled butter-and-cheese churn: the milk goes into the drum of an old washing machine that shakes it wildly up and down, and in practically no time there is the unlikely miracle of butter. Just two weeks ago I watched Bedouin women doing it the old way, in a goat-skin hung over a fire and rocked back and forth for long hours. This turbine at Shuneran is like a gift from the gods.

Ofra, wiry, battle-worn, lucid, is speaking to the crowd as Yusri translates into Arabic: "The occupation has an interest in preventing us from meeting one another, and an even greater interest in preventing us from struggling together. But we will never allow them to separate us. This is our responsibility and our answer to apartheid. We had to get past the barriers and roadblocks to come here today, and we also had to break through the metaphorical walls that have divided us." I wonder how Yusri is going to manage this last sentence. He lives in a world of very real walls and barriers. But no, he's got it, no problem: "hawajiz majaziyeh--that is," he explains, "the walls that have been erected in our minds."

Still, it looks like today is going to be rather bland. There are the dialogue sessions that take time—many of the Israeli Combatants have never been in South Hebron or anywhere else in the territories, and some are meeting living people from the other side for the first time. The seasoned few of us from Ta'ayush wait, a little bored. The truth is we're having trouble holding ourselves back from what our instincts tell us is the thing to do—that is, from marching the whole crowd up the hill toward the new outpost. It's not every day you get 150 activists here in Susya. But there's been a decision: no confrontations today. You can't expose the first-timers to the whole terror and rigor of the occupation. And yet that hill is so enticing. There's a new settler caravan in place, too. All we have to do is to start walking…..

And then, surprisingly, a new decision crystallizes. We will "take" that hill after all. We'll follow Nasir up to the ancient well that belongs to the Hadari-Hareini families but that is now off limits to them; the settlers won't let them near it. South Hebron is a hot, dry land, and a well means the difference between life and death. We head out over the rocky terraces. Movement, at last, and action: the relief is sweet and viscous as a heady liquor. My lungs take in the sharp smell of wild sage, thyme, and the aromatic herb the Palestinians call Amaslimaniya, said to heal infections and stomach pains. I wonder if it heals heart-ache, too. The very fragrance seems to be healing mine.

This was today's second surpassing moment— all 150 of us fanning out over that hill, advancing toward the settlers' caravan. We reach the well, and Nasir finds the black leather bucket and lowers it deep into the bowels of the earth and draws up fresh spring water, the sweetest water in the world; he pours it into our bottles and canteens and straight into our mouths, he is smiling as if entranced, drunk on the water of his own well, soaked to the skin, and for that brief unforgettable minute or two the world seems almost right again. And then, of course, the soldiers swoop down on us, with some lunatic settler barking orders at them, and the officer flashes the inevitable piece of paper that declares we are in a Closed Military Zone and we have two minutes to get out before they start hitting us with their clubs and rifle butts and making arrests. The rightful owner of the precious well is driven off, again. The thief who has stolen the well stands beside it together with asmall army of soldiers, with their perfectly legal slip of paper, to make sure he gets to keep it.

We have promised the Combatants that we won't get into any kind of tussle, so slowly—but still almost triumphant—we begin to withdraw. Take it as an object lesson, I say to Amit, a new friend from Tel Aviv. This is how it works. Amit, a doctoral student in philosophy, specialist in Husserl, is incredulous, not for the last time today. Don't worry, I say; we will yet turn the tide. As we walk, Joseph, by now a stalwart of South Hebron weekends, tells us about the organization called Nefesh be-nefesh, "Soul for Soul", run by two rabbis in Miami and supported by the Christian Zionist right; they paid him $4000 to come to live in Israel, and they promised him another $4000 if he'd make his home in one of the settlements in the territories."I wonder," he says, "if Palestinian Susya would count."

By now our appetite has been whetted, and Amiel and Ezra decide that our small Ta'ayush contingent will pay a visit, on our way home, to the plot of land that settlers near Hebron have recently stolen from the Ja'abar family; they've put up a small, ugly shack on the land, with a "porch" canopied by brown camouflage net. Last week the army chased them off, because of our pressure, but they came back, of course, within a few hours. It's time to pay them another visit. So we head north in the Palestinian van with Isa, and at some point along the highway we get out and make our way through dessicated vineyards and fallow fields uphill to the Ja'abars and then on to the hilltop and its hut. Some eight or nine settler teenagers in Sabbath white are sitting there, looking rather weary. Our arrival jogs them awake, and a messenger is sent to bring reinforcements; soon some older ones turn up, including a long-haired, wild-eyed boy-man caressing his M-16, his finger on the trigger andthe clip loaded inside. He's crazy, Amiel says, be careful. We stare him down. Amit tries to talk to them—I think he'd like to persuade them by reasoned argument that what they're doing is immoral—with the usual result. I'm not sure how long the stalemate would have continued if we hadn't got the call from Isa: settlers are shooting in the village of Khirbet Safa; come at once.

We rush back to the van and race north, turning west at Beit Umar. At once we're in the heart of Palestine. The roads are riddled with pot-holes, we pass donkeys and horses and rather a lot of goats and olive trees and ragged children. After a while we see that people are standing on their flat root-tops, apparently watching the battle going on in the village below them. And the first noises impinge upon us—the distant drumming of the guns. I am wondering what we're supposed to do. And what if we get caught between rock-throwing village teenagers and trigger-happy soldiers? Four people died here in the last few days. Some nervous thoughts flit through my brain, I think of my grandchildren, and Eileen, what am I doing here, then I remember my grand-uncle, drowned at seventeen. If only some decent person had been there to help. My head clears. Like any battle-field, this one is confusing; it takes some time, as we proceed into the village, to figure out who is doing what towhom. But half a kilometer or so away we see the army jeeps and half-tracks, and there are also soldiers standing near a wire fence with guns shouldered, as if to provide cover for the settlers. Two blue jeeps of Border Police turn up beside us on the road, and more soldiers jump out and take up their positions, focusing their telescopic sights.

Then it really begins. First the stun grenades, then the rubber-coated bullets—the Palestinians know each lethal genus and genre by the sound—then live bullets, lots of them. Crack crack crack—and the horrible hollow echo each time, as if the shot had turned back on itself and was reaching out toward any soft, vulnerable surface. We take shelter on the porch of a new stone house by the roadside. There are several women draped in black, and a younger one, elegantly dressed, with a baby cradled in a blanket in her arms. I count seven young children. One of the older women is trembling and crying; I wish I could comfort her or calm her. Isa, gallant Isa, with his weak heart, too full of feeling, smiles calmly. He's another one of God's miracles, Isa, a man of principle, totally committed to non-violent action, never afraid, never too tired to notice the fear or pain of those around him. It's worth coming here just to be with Isa. Then there's our driver, who says to me—echoing myown words earlier to Amit—"It's a good lesson. This is how things are, most days. It's a lesson in politics, or in war, in war as a part of politics." In the midst of it all, the women, intent on caring for their guests under any circumstances, serve tiny cups of Turkish coffee. Minutes pass to the accompaniment of intermittent rifle fire. The white-and-beige goats next door are furiously chewing away at the thorny shrubs in the yard, heedless of the vast ruckus just outside the gate. Maybe they're used to it by now.

Slowly we piece together from the villagers the story of this afternoon. First the settlers from Bat 'Ayin came in, shooting their guns. Some of the young men from the village tried to fight back, to protect their homes and families with whatever they had, and all they had was rocks. Then the soldiers arrived to save the settlers and started shooting, and the rock-throwing intensified. This is one way to reconstruct the sequence. By now it hardly matters. The only question is how to stop it.

I hear wailing and screaming from somewhere to my right, amidst the olive trees and terraces, and then Amiel is calling me to come quickly; I was trained as a combat medic, and someone has been hit. I set off running in the direction of the screams, through the trees behind the houses, trying at the same time to find in my shoulder-bag the small set of pads and bandages and the rubber elastic to use as a tourniquet that I always bring along with me to South Hebron. It's been almost exactly 27 years, I quickly calculate, since I last ran like this to a wounded man, in the first Lebanon war; and God only knows if I'll remember what to do. They always used to tell us that the knowledge is buried in your fingers and will re-emerge automatically when you need it. I hope they're right. In any case, there's no time to think. The wailing intensifies. Suddenly they're waving to me to turn back; an ambulance has found its way over the hill and driven off with the victim. Later we hearthat he's wounded "moderately." Could have been worse.

And then we're back on the street standing right under the soldiers, and stray rocks are crashing down near us, and one of the young student girls who came with us is hit in the leg. She's a little shaken. A Palestinian woman needs to get home, perhaps she's worried about her children, she's afraid to climb the hill alone, so we envelop her on all sides and walk her uphill past the soldiers, who yell at us and try to stop us, but we ignore them and keep walking, and maybe after all we're finally having some effect on them because at last they hold their fire. Slowly, tentatively, painfully, a certain quiet sinks in as evening comes on and the hills turn purple and then black. As is his wont, Ezra materializes suddenly, just where he is needed; how he got here through all the chaos I will never know, but he is all smiles and he says to us, "You should know that it's only because we're here that they've stopped shooting." He's indomitable, another great innocent, great-heartedand clear; he stops in the street to remonstrate with the young rock-throwers. If only they would learn not to do that. He thinks someday they will learn.

It's hard to find a good man or a good woman, but I've been lucky in this respect. In fact, I've surrounded myself with them. As we walk back toward the van, Amit, the philosopher, tells me that this whole business just doesn't make sense. Why doesn't the army demolish the rickety hut those settlers have put up on the Ja'abar family's land? For that matter, why does the State of Israel send its soldiers to protect the settlers in the first place? And what was the point of shooting live bullets at the village once the settlers had been scuttled away? What's there to be gained from it? Everything seems to him surreal. He's right. A Jewish pogrom is surreal. He's learning Greek, it turns out, and they've just started reading Plato's Apology in class. I remember that joy. It feels good, and somehow right, to remember it here in Khirbet Safa, as we prepare to leave. For a passing second I can hear Socrates speaking to the settlers, who would undoubtedly have been all too happy tocondemn him to die—who would probably have shot him outright: "Don't think that by killing someone you can escape being blamed for your own wickedness; that is neither possible nor honorable….Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods."

Sunday, May 3, 2009

This post contains a letter from New Profile analyzing the persecution of their members and asking for support. JPN editor Rela Mazali is a co-founder of New Profile and one of the letter's authors. Of the investigation into New Profile, Rela explains, "I'd like to say clearly that I don't think persecution of New Profile is (or will be) severe or extremely frightening. It's bad but by no means terrifying. I see it, however, as a unique and important opportunity to open up people's eyes to the much more severe, frightening and brutal reality of Palestinians' persecution, 'simply' (and sadly) because in this case it is 'respectable', middle class, (some) middle-aged, Jewish, Ashkenazi women who are being targeted. In this case, the targets look credible and are not suspect 'by definition' because of their ethnicity/nationality/skin color/accent."

We are also forwarding links to two commentaries on New Profile's situation:

1) In Counterpunch, Deb Reich uses her "sharp, exposing humor" (as Rela calls it) to describe New Profile's activities - giving young people a place to consider and discuss military service in the IDF, a topic that deeply troubles so many of them - as well as New Profile's perceived threat to society, which boils down to the subversiveness of people talking to each other about serious issues like the draft or soldiers' suicides or even the non-militarized state that these New Profile activists started to imagine years ago. http://www.counterpunch.com/reich05012009.html

2) Gideon Levy takes on the same topic: this government's attack on left-wing protest, from shooting at protesters against the separation barrier to raiding homes and confiscating computers. As Levy says, "Locking up three and a half million Palestinians in the occupied territories and denying them basic human rights has already undermined Israel's pretention of democracy, but now dangerous cracks are appearing in our Jews-only democracy." He continues, "Those who are silent now should not be surprised if one day they wake up and see the police outside the home of a poet whose message is forbidden." http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082567.html

The attempt to criminalize New Profile, begun in September 2008 with the Israeli Attorney General's announcement of a criminal investigation of the movement, has now been accelerated. On April 26th, a day before Israel's Memorial Day, Israeli police produced a hyperbolic piece of political theater. As if facing down a dangerous organized crime "family", they "raided" – to quote their press release – the homes of six activists in different parts of Israel, who were summoned for interrogation. Exploiting the ritual emotions of a day of mourning for military dead, this police action singled out and branded anti-militarist activists as non-members of the legitimate community, implying that they (we) are fair game.

New Profile issued a press release the same day and the US-based Jewish Voice for Peace followed up immediately with an urgent appeal for action.

The activists detained have meanwhile been released on bail under restraining orders; their personal computers currently remain impounded. As of this writing, police have summoned ten additional activists for interrogation.

In the paragraphs below, we provide our analysis of the government's campaign of suppression along with our request for support. Your support and solidarity is deeply important to us.Read more and act: • Context for the targeting of New Profile • What you can do • Key links • Where to address your letters of protest • Where to send "Letters to the Editor": Israeli Press Contacts

Context for the targeting of New Profile

The attempted criminalization of New Profile amounts to no less than a state war on youth. Rising numbers of young Jewish Israelis (as well as members of the Druze minority also subject to conscription) find themselves unable or unwilling to accept the over-used Israeli dictate: "There's no other choice". Despite the ongoing draft, more than half of all eligible Israelis no longer serve or complete their obligatory service in the military. Though Israeli law offers virtually no legal provision for Conscientious Objection, young people have found their own way to vote with their feet.

Officials initiated the New Profile investigation "because of growing concern at the defense establishment of a growing trend of draft evasion. In July 2007 Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi declared publicly that they would fight the trend." (Ha'aretz, 4/27/2009). Clearly, it's not New Profile that they're worried about. New Profile is an easy, visible scapegoat through which they hope to sow fear and intimidate future draft resisters, whom they stigmatize as "shirkers". The state has declared a war against the many thousands who openly resist or dodge the draft and refuse to place their bodies, their minds, their morality at the disposal of vision-less politicians.

Israel's war on its youth is being fought within a broader context of spiraling repression of political dissent. Activists were detained by the hundreds for protesting Israel's attack against Gaza last January, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel, some of whom still remain in detention. Non-violent protesters against the land-gobbling dragon of Israel's separation wall are regularly targeted by lethal fire. Weeks ago Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma of Bil'in was killed by soldiers, becoming the 18th Palestinian killed while protesting the separation barrier.

In most cases, the repressive measures applied to Jewish activists still bear no comparison, in terms of arbitrariness and brutality, to the means employed against Palestinians. And yet, the political theater of repression now being played out against New Profile is of great importance—· First, because every act of repression is important and should be resisted.· Second, because when it is applied to a group of relatively privileged, middle class, largely middle aged, feminists – it tends to be more visible to mainstream Israeli society, more easily exposing its fabric of lies and ludicrous, trumped-up charges, in turn allowing decent but uninformed people a concrete grasp of the reality of repression.· Third, because in the balance, yet again, lie the future of freedom and rights for everyone in Israel/Palestine.· Fourth, because what is at stake are the lives of Israeli youth against whom the state is waging this war.Many of you have readily recognized the gravity of this turn of events and written us to express support and solidarity. You have also asked how to offer material help. Networks of sustained, resilient and persistent support-and-protest are vital for resisting and reversing the destructive anti-democracy now openly governing Israel/Palestine. We appreciate any small or large action you can take and truly need you, now and over the months and years to come.

What you can do

Here is a list of things you can do:

1. Join the appeal of Jewish Voice for Peace (see also the statement and form for sending letters of protest from War Resisters' International).

2. Write a short letter of protest to Israeli officials; see list of officials and their contact information below.

3. Reach out to journalists from your community, provide them with material and suggest they interview New Profile activists in your local or national media. To coordinate interviews, email us at nppr@newprofile.org .

4. Organize a parlor meeting or a community meeting to discuss, learn about and publicize the current escalation in Israel in the politicized use of police and courts as a means of gagging dissent—most brutally among Palestinian citizens of Israel (for instance, see here) and among Jewish peace activists;

5. Use technology to bring us to your meeting, via video (on "Skype" for instance) or conference call; this is a very effective method for us to communicate with you and your group directly.

6. Write a short letter of protest to Israeli media, in your own language or in Hebrew if you're able. See list of media contacts, below. Please send us copies of anything you write and any answers you receive to: nppr@newprofile.org.

7. Distribute our Press Release and the appeal from Jewish Voice for Peace among friends, family, acquaintances, other activists, at work places, community centers, schools, colleges, activist groups and ask people to disseminate them further.

Nadia Hijab, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, writes a column that gets distributed to subscribers.

In this article she looks at some of the successes of the Israel boycott, a global and growing movement.She mentions 3 reasons for the success: first, boycotts enable ordinary citizens to take direct action. An example is Adalah in New York, with its targeting of diamond merchant Lev Leviev.

A second reason is the visible role Jewish human rights groups have been taking, putting a dent in the claim that these actions are motivated by anti-Semitism. One of the examples she gives is Jewish Voice forPeace campaign against Caterpillar.

And a third reason is the determined leadership of Palestinian civil society:"In 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society coalitions, organizations, and unions, from the occupied territories, within Israel, and in exile issued a formal call for an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) until Israel abides by international law."

s column by the Institute's Senior Fellow, Nadia Hijab, was syndicated on 30 April 2009 by Agence Global. The opinions in this piece are her own. The column may be circulated on listservs but may not be republished without permission from Agence Global. For contact information regarding rights and permissions see below.

The Israel Boycott is Biting

By Nadia Hijab

On May 4, protesters will greet Motorola shareholders, already disgruntled by the company's losses, as they arrive for their annual meeting at the Rosemont Theater in Chicago, Illinois.

The protest, organized by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, is part of a drive to "Hang Up On Motorola" until it ends sales of communications and other products that support Israel's military occupation of Palestinian land.

Inside the meeting, the Presbyterian, United Methodist and other churches will urge shareholders to support their resolution, which calls for corporate standards grounded in international law. Doing the right thing could also reduce the risk of "consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns and lawsuits."

Although Motorola executives deny it, such risks must have played a part in their decision to sell the department making bomb fuses shortly after Human Rights Watch teams found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers at some of the civilian sites bombed by Israel in its December-January assault on Gaza.

The US protests are part of a growing global movement that has taken international law into its own hands because governments have not. And, especially since the attacks on Gaza, the boycotts have been biting. There are three reasons why.

First, boycotts enable ordinary citizens to take direct action. For instance, the New York group Adalah decided to target diamond merchant Lev Leviev, whose profits are plowed into colonizing the West Bank. During the Christmas season, they sing carols with the words creatively altered to urge shoppers to boycott his Madison Avenue store.

The British group Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine teamed up with Adalah NY and others to exert public pressure on the British government regarding Leviev. The British Embassy in Tel Aviv recently cancelled plans to rent premises from Leviev's company Africa-Israel.

There are other results. Activists in Britain have targeted the supermarket chain Tesco to stop the sales of Israeli goods produced in settlements. In a video of one such action -- over 38,000 YouTube views to date -- Welsh activists load up a trolley with settlement products and push it out of the shop without paying.

All the while, they calmly explain to the camera just what they are doing and why. They talk away as they pour red paint over the produce, and as British Bobbies quietly lead them away to a police van.

The result of such consumer boycotts? A fifth of Israeli producers have reported a drop in demand since the assault on Gaza, particularly in Britain and Scandinavia.

The second reason boycotts are more effective is the visible role of Jewish human rights advocates, making it harder for Israel to argue that these actions are anti-Semitic.

For example, British architect Abe Hayeem, an Iraqi Jew, describes in a passionate column in The Guardian exactly how Leviev tramples on Palestinian rights, and warns Israeli architects involved in settlements that they will be held to account by their international peers.

In the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has led an ongoing campaign to stop Caterpillar from selling bulldozers to Israel, which militarizes them and uses them in home demolitions and building the separation wall.

The third, key, reason for the growing success of this global movement is the determined leadership of Palestinian civil society. The spark was lit at the world conference against racism in Durban in 2001. In 2004, Palestinian civil society launched an academic and cultural boycott that is having an impact.

In 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society coalitions, organizations, and unions, from the occupied territories, within Israel, and in exile issued a formal call for an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) until Israel abides by international law. The call sets out clear goals for the movement and provides a framework for action.

In November 2008, Palestinian NGOs helped convene an international BDS conference in Bilbao, Spain, to adopt common actions. This launched a "Derail Veolia" campaign. That French multinational corporation, together with another French company, Alstom, is building a light railway linking East Jerusalem to illegal settlements.

The light rail project was cited by the Swedish national pension fund in its decision to exclude Alstom from its $15 billion portfolio, and by the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council in its decision not to consider further Veolia's bid for a $1.9 billion waste improvement plan. There were active grassroots campaigns in both areas.

Other hits: Veolia lost the contract to operate the city of Stockholm subway and an urban network in Bordeaux. Although these were reportedly "business decisions" there were also activist campaigns in both places. The Galway city council in Ireland decided to follow Stockholm's example. Meanwhile, Connex, the company that is supposed to operate the light rail, is being targeted by activists in Australia.

The "Derail Veolia" campaign has been the movement's biggest success to date. Veolia and its subsidiaries are estimated to have lost as much as $7.5 billion.

As one of the BDS movement leaders, Omar Barghouti, put it, "When companies start to lose money, then they listen." Perhaps governments will too.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Last week, seven activists (five of them from New Profile), were surprised in their homes by Israeli policeman, brought in for interrogation and their computers confiscated. New Profile is being investigated for allegedly "inciting to evade military service." The charges are bizarre, since New Profile, which works against militarism in Israeli society, has always operated openly and publicly. The only conclusion is that this is a politically inspired witchhunt. This raid seems to be an escalation by the Israeli government in its attempt to intimidate and harass political activists.

Twenty three feminist organizations sent a letter in solidarity with New Profile to the Ministry of Justice protesting the police's action.

On Thursday there was a demonstration in front of a Tel Aviv police station in solidarity with New Profile's arrestees. The items below explain what happened: a crowd of over 100 people, mostly women, some elderly, gathered chanting and holding signs in protest. Without warning, police waded in very violently, arresting 8 people and beating and pushing several others:

Police made eight arrests Thursday during a protest at a Tel Aviv police station. Demonstrators were protesting a police raid on two websites that promote draft-dodging in Israel and the simultaneous arrests of several activists involved in their activity.

About 50 protestors arrived at the Dizengoff St. Police Station; six women and two men were detained by Police Special Forces.

Ayelet Maoz, an activist with the Coalition of Women for Peace and one of the organizers of the protest, said the police had been excessively violent with the demonstrators.

"They were pushing people into the street without stopping the traffic. There are a few people here who nearly got run over. These are women over 80 years of age," she said. "This is not how the police are supposed to behave in Israel. We plan to file a complaint."

She said the law did not require them to file for a permit to stage the protest because it was merely an act of maintaining a quiet presence there throughout the day.

A police statement said the demonstrators had been offered a meeting with the station chief but had refused.

"This was an illegal protest staged by feminists and anarchists. The women besieged the station and would not allow anyone to enter or exit," the statement said, adding that attempts were made to move the protestors across the street before eight were detained for "rioting and failure to obey police orders."

Earlier this week police raided the offices of New Profile and Target 21, two websites that promote the dodging of the IDF's mandatory draft. [this is interesting, since NP has no office! Dorothy]

A total of 23 feminist organizations were angered by the move, and an enraged letter on the matter was sent to the Interior Ministry.

Dorit Abramowitz, an activist for the organizations, explained that the large-scale feminist uprising was due to a violation of freedom of speech laws.

"In any democracy there must be an opposition, but as we understand it, once an organization says something that differs from the government's opinion they start to probe their files. We see this as a dictatorial move," she said.